Tag Archives: family activities

I’m the youngest of four kids…by a lot. And while I kinda love feeling like an only child now that everyone’s moved out, I missed some of the little activities that my siblings did when they were younger. So my mom and I have been recreating the Christmas themed activities the last couple years. Last year we painted ornaments and this year we painted cinnamon sticks to look like Santa Claus. Santa Sticks were super easy and didn’t take long at all so here’s a step by step tutorial (with pictures) of how to do it.

You’ll need:

Acrylic paint

red

white

black

flesh tone

Paint brushes

Cinnamon sticks

Styrofoam box

The Styrofoam box is used to hold the cinnamon sticks while they’re drying so if you have some other method of propping them up, like a test tube rack, you don’t need the Styrofoam. If you do buy the Styrofoam remember that the cinnamon sticks have to be shoved in pretty far in order to stay so go with a deep box. We did 7×7 and that worked well. And cinnamon sticks are available at most craft stores, especially around the holidays.

A quick word about paint. If you’re like my family and own a million colors of paint but none that are suitable for skin, you might need to mix your own. We mixed and light brown, white, and pink to create a pretty good peachy tone. If you are going to mix your own color, be patient and just keep adding and mixing until you’ve got the color you want.

We used several differently sized paint brushes. We had a small one for detail work like the mustache, a slightly bigger one for the beard, and a foam brush that is about an inch thick. That’s just what he had on hand and any number of brushes would work.

Now that you have all of you materials, let’s begin.

Paint the cinnamon stick red. We used rather large cinnamon sticks so we only painted the top third, however it is up to you on how elongated and large you want your cinnamon Santa to look. We had to use two coats of red paint in order to cover up the brown of the cinnamon stick.

Add white and black stripes to mimic the Santa suit. Feel free to also add buttons, which we did by dipping the back of a paint brush handle in paint and using that to create more perfect circles.

Take the flesh color and paint an oval. This will be the face. Be aware of where your putting it so that it lines up with any buttons and does not interfere with the shape of the cinnamon stick.

Decorate with the details! We added a beard, eyes, a mustache, and the mouth. We chose to make the mouth singing, because Santa has a beautiful voice!

So that’s it. Hope you can use these instructions to make these cinnamon stick Santa’s with someone. Comment below if you have any questions! Happy Holidays!!